Boswell had been a kind landlord. Johnson, in the early days of their acquaintance, “had recommended to him a liberal kindness to his tenantry, as people over whom the proprietor was placed by Providence.” The advice was congenial to his natural disposition. In his will, which he made ten years before his death, he says: “As there are upon the estate of Auchinleck several tenants whose families have possessed their farms for many generations, I do by these presents grant leases for nineteen years and their respective lives to”—here follow the names of eight tenants. He continues:—“And I do beseech all the succeeding heirs of entail to be kind to the tenants, and not to turn out old possessors to get a little more rent.” We may venture to express a hope that his descendants, if they have slighted him as an author, have always honoured and followed him as a landlord. [Illustration: NEW HAILES.] HAMILTON, EDINBURGH, NEW HAILES, BALLENCRIEFF, AND CRANSTON, NOVEMBER 8-22. [Sidenote: FROM AUCHINLECK TO EDINBURGH.] Leaving Auchinleck on the morning of November 8, our travellers arrived that night at Hamilton on the road to Edinburgh. They had crossed Drumclog Moor, the scene of the skirmish nearly one hundred years earlier where Claverhouse was beaten by the Covenanters. Scott in _Old Mortality_ has told how in the fight John Balfour of Burley struck down Sergeant Bothwell. Fifty years or so after our travellers crossed the Moor, Thomas Carlyle and Edward Irving passed over it on foot. “It was here,” says Carlyle, “as the sun was sinking, Irving drew from me by degrees, in the softest manner, the confession that I did not think as he of the Christian religion, and that it was vain for me to expect I ever could or should.”[815] Boswell’s record of this day’s journey is of the briefest. “We came at night to a good inn at Hamilton. I recollect no more.” A writer in the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ gives us a humorous description of the innkeeper. “Hamilton Arms, kept by Burns, tolerable. The landlord from pure insipidity will laugh at you if you come in wet through; yet he can tell a good deal about the Duke’s family.”[816] Smollett gives the little town the highest praise in his vocabulary, by calling it “one of the neatest he had seen in any country.”[817] Whatever nature could do, the force of art could no farther go last century than make a place neat. Boswell, before they left next morning, in vain tried to move Johnson to visit the Palace of Hamilton, as the Duke’s castle is called. “He had not come to Scotland to see fine places of which there were enough in England.” He would do nothing more than view the outside. [Sidenote: RETURN TO EDINBURGH.] That same night “they arrived at Edinburgh after an absence of eighty-three days. For five weeks together of the tempestuous season,” adds Boswell, “there had been no account received of us.” Yet, as the crow flies, they had never at their farthest been two hundred miles away.